I did this. It's not for everyone, but for a highly motivated person it's not that hard either.
A friend who's in Med School wanted better working conditions than working at crappy call centers. I gave him a high-level overview of what programming is about and threw him the Django tutorial and made myself available for questions. As I gave him practical requests for useful web code, I delved into the details of Python and web programming in general, while slowly introducing him to tools of the trade like the shell, debuggers, and data structures, trying to make every step of the way easier for him.
Six months later he got a job at a biomedical NGO. He began by documenting and testing existing code, but now does quite a bit of coding by himself.
I've found that teaching theory along with the tools that utilize it to be a very good strategy.
A friend who's in Med School wanted better working conditions than working at crappy call centers. I gave him a high-level overview of what programming is about and threw him the Django tutorial and made myself available for questions. As I gave him practical requests for useful web code, I delved into the details of Python and web programming in general, while slowly introducing him to tools of the trade like the shell, debuggers, and data structures, trying to make every step of the way easier for him.
Six months later he got a job at a biomedical NGO. He began by documenting and testing existing code, but now does quite a bit of coding by himself.
I've found that teaching theory along with the tools that utilize it to be a very good strategy.